Population Splitting

In all likelihood, your colony would probably start out extremely dependent on you but after reaching a certain threshold of independence would become a rival for resources. The benefit would be that you have another village nearby that shares your culture and religion so they’re more likely to come to each others’ common defense.

Yes we don’t know much about them, but one thing to consider is that site was abandoned, meaning it failed. You also don’t really see the development of rigid social classes until the city appears. In a village, everybody is farming for the most part and typically everyone has to pitch in during harvest. In a city, not everyone needs to be a farmer as you have enough food cultivation that certain people can begin doing other activities. You see the development of social class as certain people are considered “better” at certain things. Like maybe one guy is good at communicating with the gods so that becomes his role. Maybe some people are good at fighting or the temporary watch and it becomes a permanent guard or military role.

I mean it’s more in reference in getting these people to come to a consensus and do something all together. The hunter-gather form of leadership, of generally everyone having a say, doesn’t work once you have so many people. That’s why you see the development of, in most cases, a strong theocratic ruler. It’s someone who can make quick decisions without consulting all 5,000 individuals in the community. Imagine how hard it is just to get 3 of year friends to do something, then multiply that by several hundred or thousand.

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We do not know but so much about Catalhoyuk, but we know the population was easily in excess of 2000 for well over a thousand years. We do not know that it failed, either. There can be many reasons why it ended. Also, if it did fail, the reasons may have nothing to do with larger populations or may be more indirect. The Kona plain underwent climate changes due that time, for example.

I wish we knew more, but we don’t. Also, we don’t yet know how much of an outlier that site was.

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By failed I was more so referring to the fact that from archeological evidence, it appears Çatalhöyük was abandoned by its inhabitants. When something is abandoned it could be due to many reasons but from what we know, a good guess would be climate change made farming difficult so they weren’t able to feed their population. But yes, we don’t know much about the site. The first “true” city appears in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley. They were agricultural cities, whereas many of the other cities founded by Empires during the bronze age were imperial cities that typically housed their bureaucrats, soldiers, and palace. Civilization as we know it is typically defined by monumental architecture, language, some form of writing, and religion.

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Very true, but it could be more complex than that. Remember Jericho. It is built, rebuilt, and inhabited, reinhabited.

Worse, if the reasoning behind people leaving had something to do with their beliefs, we may never be able to figure it out. (E.g They become convinced the land is cursed, even if technically everything is fine)

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True, although I would say that religion was a way to explain natural occurrences. So if for example they thought the land was cursed it would be due to some natural phenomenon such as say a solar eclipse, some kind of ecological disaster, climate change, etc.

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While religions are often descriptive of nature, they tend to be prescriptive of action, as informed by context (e.g. nature). Given the changes in the Holocene during this time, it makes a lot of sense that environment or perhaps a plague may indeed have been the cause.

Of course, we can never rule out events such as an elder “receiving a vision” informing people to leave or do something else lol

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Asked my Civilization and the City professor about this today. He said that if you look at archeological evidence, it has no defining characteristics of a city. He also said that it definitely never reached more than 1000-2000 people. He said in fact, there’s evidence that they split their population multiple times in the form that there’s archeological evidence of people with the exact same culture in several different locations around Çatalhöyük. He also said its theorized that there used to be a river running through Çatalhöyük which would have separated the people on each side.

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I am not sure how your professor can be such a declarative statement when the actual researchers cannot make such an exact estimate with a boundary statement of “definitely.” According to Dr. Ian Hodder, director of the Catalhouk study by Standford, estimates have varied, but between 1000-8000 (originally estimated by Dr. Mellart, the first to examine the site.)*
I am not an expert on the issue (not even an archaeologist), so I get my information from the team specifically studying this proto-city.

Here is one of many good papers from the director of the research team investigating Catalhoyuk. He provides some population numbers in the paper (as well as many others he has posted if you dig around the Stanford website).

I studied this at great length before I wrote about it in my 3rd novel, as well as contacting Dr. Hodder and Stanford in general about certain key points. You may find the vast databases of the Catalhoyuk project of use. I spend months reading every document in them. I was so pleased with their work that I became a donor to the project.

Also, Catalhoyuk isn’t a city (it’s is often colloquially called one), but it is a proto-city, which may be what you professor was alluding to.

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I shouldn’t have used the word definitely. I asked my prefessor because I go to a research institution and his expertise is early human history. He essentially said there’s many different theories on the site. He said the estimates for how many people lived together often vary depending on the researcher by different definitions of what together means.

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Ok. That makes sense.
There ars in fact my hypothese. For my books, I chose a model where the society was split in two by major family group associations, reinforced culturally. That is, however, just a model. lol

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I don’t believe Forcing you to split you city when it reaches 1000-2000 will make for a good game. As people tend to resist and rebel against forcing any thing.

My suggestion is to provide the developers ideas on how to pressure he player into dividing his city/tribe.

One idea is disease/heath the bigger a city gets the more disease/health problems there are.

Also my guess is a population of 50-100 is more realistic as my guess is by the time you get to a pop of 1000 the last thing the player wants to do is micromanage a smaller group at a pop of 1000-2000 players are likely looking at ways to build there empire so they have actualy finished playing the game level 1.

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This is supposed to be a historical simulation of the events that actually occurred during the Neolithic period. Population splitting happened everywhere around the world except perhaps the Americas. When populations weren’t split chaos ensued and traditional society broke down.

In the Americas with the Maya for example, they weren’t able to split their populations because of hostile city states all around and the guys forming a new city would be the first to be attacked. So instead of expanding, they just built up. Many civilizations in the Americas were dealing with very tropical, heavily forested, mountainous terrain and were settled in valleys. Turns out expanding up the sides of valleys requires removing vegetation that’s important for preventing mud slides. And in the rain forest/tropical climate only the top soil is nutrient rich so when they kept building up and up the mountain sides, the crops at the top would get the good soil, but all the nutrient poor, acidic soil would wash all over the farms below. This resulted in increasingly diminishing crop yields as the soil got poorer and poorer for the lower down farms. Eventually everybody abandoned the cities and started living in the rain forests in villages again. When society breaks down, people naturally return to what’s known to have worked in the past.

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Free distribution of hearts as this topic is really interesting (at least I’m very interested in).

Like @jrpjim (and others maybe) I think there should be interesting and meaningful reasons to split population. A good number may come very fast in mind:

  • tech level: without a “social tech” advancement you just can’t manage to rule over a certain number of citizens. Meaning, with costly and more elaborate rulership & religious ceremonies and rituals you’d be able to make you society more consistent. Whenever you reach the cap, you should not have half your citizens leaving, but clearly get a progressively insane situation, event-driven, with feuds and quarrels running havoc among your people until enough are dead ir you decided for instance to banish a few families.
  • other techs are important also: with higher efficiency in farming, hunting, fishing or storing you should be able to benefit more of the ressources on you limited city map. Whenever you reach a cap, people should either starve, get ill and improductive or leave.
  • having an important influence area should help having a higher cap: people coming from the whole area to visit your gods, your chief, your enclosure, trade in great religious meetings, etc. This should help you “collecting” more ressources and feed your population thanks to gifts, animals sacrificed there by outsiders, etc.
  • whenever you have too much people in your settlement for the amount of ressources you should be abke to “trade” them: your daughters for a political alliance, or for a great farmer, or for some interesting ressources, etc.
  • splitting should also be seen as utterly necessary for the player. City maps should not have every ressource, so if for instance you’re deprived of stone but your people use to exploit some 3 day away in the hills, you should have every advantage to send some people live nearby, permanently–they still would be an off-map colony (like a satellite or submitted settlement) with strong links regarding culture/faith/kinship and would warrant a regular income in the said ressource for a reasonnable amount of e.g. food or anything. In Neolithic they did that for herding, farming, mining, so this definitively should be in game.
  • those off-map sites should also be the very first step of your empire, with people from foreign settlements able to settle there also, leading either to peaceful relations there, or quarrels, needing you to intervene to drive off the newcomers, etc. This would help make the surrounding world alive, and oblige you to politics and diplomacy with your neighbors.
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I think you did a fantastic job of putting everything that was said in this thread into the context of gameplay. I definitely agree with soft caps, as most players are not fans of being forced to do just about anything and see things more in terms of necessity.

The rest sounds good and are valid reasons to split the tribe, but this one feels a bit too magic.
How could this be grounded to something that could be even be separated to pieces that work in its own inside the simulation? What would represent this “social tech” in real life?

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I think there are lot of things that could be attached to that. Basically, “social techs” should be essentially flavor names, be it rituals or ceremonies in the religious or social fields. @lotus253 gave a number of hints on what was missing in DoM here (see notably the part with the big bold RITUALS).

If we just take into consideration such a social tech as “memory of the dead”: in a Ice Age family/tribe with 5 or 10 people, just speaking about a dear dead one is enough – basically like when in our family we speak about someone disappeared, telling stories about his/her life, his/her funny obsessions, etc. This is a way to create a cohesive link inside a small group like a family.
This obviously can’t work with a 200 people settlement, so to reach such a cohesive effect you need a proper ritual for the dead: a religious ceremony where every member gathers, a common sacrifice for the ancestors, a banquet and feast. This way, you could for instance have a higher cap for 30 more people in your settlement, and whenever you get this tech a dead cult may happen for instance once a year (or every 10 years, depending on timing in game). With an obvious price to pay for the banquet (food, etc.). And I may hear Lotus from here: “And shiny animations!!!”

There are lot of similar things that may be added as “social tech”: a cultic festival for harvest, for the moon, etc. Lotus could give a very long list if asked to, I’m sure of that.
Thinking about the political/social field, we could add the possibility for the big man (i.e. the player) to offer a banquet, to “buy” some important people or group or people with gifts to reassert his/her authority by showing his/her power and wealth, etc. That’s a very common practice, even today, called “paternalism” in the 19th-20th centuries when the boss of the factory used that (and think of company trips and sport events nowadays).

The bad side of such a feature with “social techs” could be having a sudden cap appearing: I think I remember you told once techs should be meaningful. The trouble is if just because you get a tech you may have +50 citizens in your settlement. To make the feeling far less “mathematical” (a.k.a. “stupid” in daily language), I think using triggered events would be totally fine to make things more fluffy:

  • if your citizen number is 10% above the cap: an event may fire up: e.g. a feud between two family heads, whatever the reason, that may create bits of chaos;
  • if you citizen number is 20% above the cap, then another event may fires up alongside the first one: e.g. disorder due to different political considerations among the groups of citizens/families, etc.
  • if you are 30% above the cap, then could be added a story about the question of sharing ressources between groups if you’re lacking them, then creating another feud, etc.
  • another case: if you’ve got some migrants who want to settle in and you’re already above the cap or about to reach it, you could get severe debates among citizens on what should be the ruler position on that: as a player you may want the newcomers to settle in as they’re damn good potters and on the long term that would be nice for every citizen; but some of those citizens may just wonder how everyone may get fed with the limited ressources of the settlement. Hence: debates, once again, and decisions to make to avoid chaos or deal with it.
    One important thing is that if implemented such events should appear randomly once reached a threshold, giving a sense of real life in the settlement.

As usual, I’m not sure if this may help making my ideas clearer or easier to grasp. And probably you’re wondering how such a things could be done technically, while I’m just thinking on a theorical level. Don’t hesitate to say if that’s the case :wink:

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And at 50% above the cap members of the group would be abandoning the proto-civilization and reverting to living in smaller villages clustered in the surrounding areas since the “city-state” could not meet their needs. I use city-state here loosely as again a city is a group of concentrated individuals numbering 5000 or more.

Every single tribal society we have ever documented (contemporary) has had beautiful, elaborate and complex rituals considered integral and essential to their cultures’ and existence. When we examine any tribal society you can imagine, we always see these complex and colorful rituals.

[Just watch this clip of what is likely a very ancient tribal dance. Can you not imagine Neolithic people doing similar things? These events would surround all parts of life, from pregnancies, births, deaths, sickness, planting, harvest, coming of age, preparing for war, the changing of the seasons, and more.]

Yet… when prehistoric tribal Europe is depicted in books, games, movies, they are always somber, bland, colorless and reserved.

This is not the fault of ancient European, but rather, the lack of research and comparative analysis by modern day folk who don’t have (or use) the imagination to make anything better. It is demonstrably unrealistic, too.

Neoltihic (Chalcolithic, Bronze and Ironage, too) should be awash with ritual.
Here is how this can be done with limited time and budget:

Create a simple set of animations/paths (Simple dance moves, a few gestures, etc)
Create a set of textures for body paint, clothing, objects,
As an example:
8 animations x 6 texture sets = 48 different looking events.

Now, for each event in the game, have various dances/rituals. Remember that individuals can have their own dances or rituals without even needing the group. We know this was common with many native American tribes where people would dance and pray as needed through the day (which makes sense for animists)

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That’s a tricky subject as words may be used differently depending on the context and their definitions may be quite different depending on the context and the language they’re used in. For instance, the daily use of cité now in (France) French is used for “problem housing estate”, or “ghetto”, due to urbanization and social history since WW2, while it was used earlier as a synonym of ville (“town”), and before that as the Latin term civitas, for an autonomous or important town, where the political and/or religious authorities had their seat–while “ville” comes from the latin name villa, meaning a farming estate.

However, I think the definition of “city” is not linked to the number of inhabitants, but to “urban functions”. Counter-example of villages with up to 10/15,000 inhabitants may be found for instance in Southern Italy or the Balkans (by memory), because they don’t have clear urban functions. Basically, they’re houses after houses after houses, even if there are a few prominent monuments, like churches.

On the contrary, cities are defined by “urban functions”, which give them a higher level in urban hierarchy:

  • cultural functions (museum, theater, schools, stadium);
  • administrative/political functions (from local authorities to the seat of government);
  • finance functions (banks, stock exchange, insurances);
  • economic functions (shops, business), etc.

So, depending on the significance of each function, you may see cities with less than 5,000 inhabitants, but with quite wide ranges if some people have to come from a long way to find there the services they need.
For instance, I’ve lived some time in a “local metropolis” (around 5,000 inhabitants), where people needed to come from up to 40km away to find a higher school or go to a movie theater. Clearly, this was not a village, even if this didn’t looked at all like Paris or a city in the German Ruhr.

This being said, what’s interesting with A.C. is that we should be able to see the passage during Neolithic from:

  • villages (no urban functions, basically only a few houses either scattered over the city map or grouped due to circumstances);
  • to nascent cities (not by the number of inhabitants, but if people come in to trade, practice their beliefs, meet the ruler for any reason…);
  • to real cities and/or city-states, either during Neolithic or later for a Bronze Age DLC.

This would be done if the player manage to deal with a number of population issues (ressources, raids, illness…) and manage to turn a few houses into a major political/economical/cultural/religious center, along those same functions I detailed earlier and that may be adapted to Neolithic times:

  • culture: a priest, a sacred place or sanctuary, a peculiar source or rock…
  • economy: a marketplace where vessel may be traded for cheese or fish, a nice bow-marker…
  • politics: the seat of the chieftain/big man, ruling maybe over a wider area than just the immediate surrounding and collecting “gifts” (or tributes) form surround settlements;
  • protection (to avoid using “administrative”): in difficult circumstances, having a wooden enclosure over a hill should be a great boon to establish a significant authority over the surrounding area by offering protection, etc.

So, basically, what we see there is the very birth of cities, like the devs always stated when they presented A.C. And hopefully with upcoming DLCs we’ll be able to turn them into real city-states.

Well I mean what I was referencing predates the advent of modernity. Modern times has seen the rise of centers of community that don’t have to follow predetermined norms due to the prevalence of transportation. Historically cities were self sustaining centers of human activity, but now you can live in the suburbs and commute to an industrial center. This never used to be the situation. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and just about everything in the South Bay is suburbs. There’s very little “city” in the cities of the South Bay. Many people just commute an hour or more to San Francisco where they work. A city like this would’ve never survived outside the contemporary world.